Smart Cargo (Project - Global Tracking)

One Record for all freight tracking purpose
Air Cargo different status to track
The last mile

Inspiration

Our application which has been inspired by the IATA Data Sharing Standard – One Record, shall call the different API (of course based on filters such as Shipment ID etc..) and creates a unique One Record to display each status (which shall be both available when any user wants to track and trace as well as tracked by the airline).

Problem/Opportunity

Despite favorable circumstances, sustained performance and an optimistic economic outlook, the air cargo industry does face challenges ahead. Let’s talk e-AWB and since its introduction in 2010, the electronic air waybill (e-AWB) has become the default contract of carriage for all air cargo shipments in a move designed to embrace digital processes and now used for more than 2 out of 3 shipments. In July 2020 alone 813000 e-AWB were used for freight operations by selected airline. Airlines don’t make money just from flying passengers: air cargo is a big business. It doesn’t fly just in dedicated freighter aircraft, but also in the belly holds of passenger flights. And right now, it’s booming.
Coming to the problem, have you not come across a situation where you found out that 23 cartons of 100 cartons arrived and the carrier messaged - “your shipment has been split for more efficient transportation.” Tracking a shipment is more tedious when Air Cargo ships consignments with another freighter/Air Cargo. What the user does not get:

First and Last mile visibility: We get only partial visibility on the shipment, with no idea as what happened on the way
Package Segregation: Whether its shipped in full or partial and with which carrier.

Another situation can be taken from an example where Air Canada doesn’t have any dedicated cargo aircraft: It makes all its cargo money from transporting freight in the holds of its passenger jets and transport the last leg (to a destination where it does not operate with Delta Airlines). The real status is not transparent to the shipper. With current situation and the way shipment(s) are carried in passenger flights, it will become crucial for the shipper as well as the customer to know if the last shipped item is on a different carrier.

What it does

Idea/Solution: What we propose in our solution/application is to create a new single record for the shipment.
Our application which has been inspired by the IATA Data Sharing Standard – One Record, shall call the different API (of course based on filters such as Shipment ID etc..) and creates a unique One Record to display each status (which shall be both available when any user wants to track and trace as well as tracked by the airline).
In our solution, we have targeted different APIs – AFKL, Qatar Airways and fetched the details and created a new one record which shall merge the details and help the user to track and trace the shipment.
This way it will be better tracked - by the combination of APIs from two different provider.
What will you get :
Location of the flight : Whether its the first carrier if its shipping the consignment or the final leg, the user shall get the status updates when it reaches destination. For e.g. if the user has shipped the cargo from BLR-DOH (Qatar Airways) and later DOH-CDG (Air France), this application will call both Airline and fetch the details into One single Record

How we built it

We brainstormed on a unified UI idea and planned our development accordingly
For the look and feel of the website we started with the visual designs and then developed using html, css and bootstrap templates.
Flask was the choice of framework to develop this prototype
We further integrated the business logic using javascript
We efficiently divided the development of backend and frontend among ourselves, so no one was idle at any point
- Firstly, we laid the groundwork to develop the OAuth handlers for individual airlines
- Tracking APIs and response processing was developed after that
- Finally the processed data is pushed as a DOM into the UI

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We participated for the first time in a global hackathon As a team, and due to Covid situation it was virtual for all of us.
But this does not stop us from connecting with each other if any one of us facing an issue (We used social platform and stayed connected)

What we learned

A lot of learning(s) especially in terms of group coding, perfecting our development skills, helping each other
There is always something that goes wrong, but it has a fix which taught us some patience during such events
Research